He quotes Aristotle differently than I would. Aristotle agreed that the higher forms of philosophy were useless, because to be useful is to be useful for something else. The very highest things we pursue for their own sake, not because it will get us to some lesser goal. You should aspire to strive for useless things, so high and fine that you would never trade them for anything else.
1 comment:
It's a good argument for the humanities in general.
However, I wonder whether most university humanities departments in the US today do more harm than good due to their political biases. It doesn't seem that the faculties in English or history have any real openness to non-left ideas; their viewpoint diversity goes from moderate left to far left.
I don't know where philosophy departments are on that.
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